


silk and lace (i'll keep you warm)

by lachesisgrimm (olga_theodora)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 5+1 format kind of, Commitment Kink, Don't copy to another site, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Modern AU, Near Car Accident, No Pregnancy, Soft Ben Solo, canon age gap, references to rough childhood, sugar Daddy vibes, wedding dress/marriage kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26184577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olga_theodora/pseuds/lachesisgrimm
Summary: Ben looked genuinely bashful, in that moment. “Commitment is… arousing.” He met her eyes through lowered lashes. “I don’t want to scare you away, Rey.”Ben has a specific kink, and his girlfriend is very intrigued.(A five times plus one format, basically.)
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 143
Kudos: 629





	silk and lace (i'll keep you warm)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [musical_milk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musical_milk/gifts).



> Earlier this week musical_milk posted a call on twitter for a fic about rich Ben buying his wife a bunch of wedding dresses because he has a marriage kink, and that prompt spoke to me on a deep level. Here is my version. I hope you like it, musical_milk!

1.

The first time, she was nervous. 

(“A wedding dress?” she repeated with a smile, wondering if she had misheard. Rolling over onto her stomach, she propped her chin on folded arms. “You jerk off to wedding dresses?”

Ben gave her a sour, pink-cheeked glare. “I do _not_ pleasure myself to wedding dresses.” Expression grumpy and uncertain, he muttered, “I may have masturbated to the thought of you in wedding dresses.”

“Why?”

When he didn’t answer, she snaked a hand under the sheets to poke at his bare hip. “Ben, we’ve been dating for four months and having sex for half that time. You can tell me about your fantasies.”

She barely heard his “It’s weird.”

“Eh.” Coming to her hands and knees, she crawled on top of him, settling herself on his chest. “Some kinks are weird, though I really shouldn’t judge. Asking me to put on a wedding dress sounds pretty tame. And sweet.” Rey raised a brow. “Unless you’re going to- I don’t know, tie me up and dump urine on my hair while I’m wearing it. Again, not judging, but also not consenting.”

There was a petulant kind of twist to his mouth, but his eyes were soft and pleading. “I would _never._ ”

“I know.” She kissed the tip of his chin. “I would break your nose if you did.”

“I just…”

Ben looked genuinely bashful, in that moment. “Commitment is… arousing.” He met her eyes through lowered lashes. “I don’t want to scare you away, Rey.”

There was an odd clutch in her chest, but it wasn’t panic. _Hope,_ Rey realized rather breathlessly. “I’m not scared.”

His hands settled lightly on her bare back. “I want to fuck my wife.” He said _my wife_ in a low purr, hands slipping to her ass. “I want to pull up her skirt in some linen closet while our guests get drunk and dance. I want to have a marital bed.”

 _With me?_ she nearly asked, teeth clamping down on the words before they escaped. Four months might mean nothing; he would likely end up with someone cultured whose sheets weren’t bought on deep discount. Rey was used to getting by on small crumbs, figuratively and emotionally, and she didn’t expect Ben to keep piling whole loaves of affection in her arms indefinitely. 

“Won’t she be lucky,” Rey said instead, and kissed him before he could reply.)

It wasn’t what he wanted. She had believed him when he had admitted a wedding dress kink (was there anything softer?), but he definitely hadn’t meant… this. Rey picked up a handful of billowing skirt, laughing half-heartedly at the puffy-shouldered long sleeves. The crinoline itched, the bodice gaped, and the whole construction reeked of Febreeze and a hint of mildew, but it had been the best of the lot when it came to fitting both her body and her bank account. She could usually perform magic with ten bucks at a Goodwill, but ten bucks only went so far in the wedding dress section, and anything more would come directly from her grocery budget. 

“He’s going to break up with you over this,” she muttered, preparing herself for derisive laughter- or worse, a hurt expression and his immediate departure. She very nearly ripped it off to change, unsure how she would hide the damn thing other than stuffing it under her bed. 

Ben’s knock came first- and then he knocked again when she lingered anxiously in her room for several minutes more, a text lighting up her cracked phone screen, and she almost tripped over the too-long skirts in her haste to reach the door before he left. “I’m sorry,” she said before the door was even fully open, tears pricking her eyelids. “It isn’t pretty, I know, but-”

Rey stopped on seeing his expression, on seeing the way he gaped. “I’m not making fun,” she whispered, dispirited. “It was a stupid idea.”

“ _No._ ” He was inside and the door was locked before she quite knew it, fingertips tracing over the sweetheart neckline of her bodice. “Rey.”

“The, uh, selections were slim.” Ben looked fucking _dazzled_ over her sequined and satiny self, and that realization left her flustered. “My closet isn’t very big, but we could put on a movie with a party scene and you could hoist me up against a wall.”

He blinked, mouth curving softly upward- and then he swept her up into his arms as dramatically as a romance hero, decades-old fabric cascading toward the floor. “I insist,” he murmured, “on having my sweet wife in a bed.”

She caught the scent of Febreeze for weeks after- in her sheets, her hair, against her skin- and blamed it on the casket-esque tupperware box under her bed that held the dress like Havisham’s corpse. 

2\. 

“Would you,” he asked hesitantly, “accept a gift? Of sorts.”

Rey had accepted a few from Ben, in their five months of dating. Books, flowers, takeout during the weeks when she had been too busy to do more than slap peanut butter on bread. Nothing more than that, though she had occasionally caught him with a look on his face as if he were considering replacing her thin winter coat or geriatric laptop. “If it’s a pony,” she said with carefully calculated humor, legs slung over his lap and back against the arm of his couch, “I couldn’t possibly care for it as lavishly as it deserves.”

“Would you like a pony?” Ben had a light in his eyes that indicated he was actually taking her at least semi-seriously, and Rey- who _knew_ he had money, but had never allowed herself to discover where he lay in the spectrum of ‘comfortable’ to ‘obscenely well-off’- wondered whether he might actually have a stable, somewhere, full of thoroughbreds and situated on hundreds of acres. “But no, not this time.”

He had worn much the same expression, she realized belatedly, when he had tentatively asked if she would be willing to wear one of his shirts to bed. “What is it?”

“Anress,” he mumbled illegibly in return, and with a blazing blush clarified, “Another dress.”

“Oh.” Rey picked up her beer from the floor, taking a sip to cover how flustered she felt. “I could… I could find another.” She could probably squeeze twenty dollars from her budget, that month; perhaps upgrade to a dress from the current century. “I did enjoy that night.”

Ben had always been a generous lover, but Ben playing the part of a newlywed husband? Incendiary. It made her irrationally hate his future wife. 

“I have one in mind.” He swirled his fingertips over her bare knee, not quite meeting her gaze. “I’ll pay for it, if you don’t mind giving me your size.”

Rey had watched enough _Say Yes To The Dress_ to hesitate. “Wedding dresses are expensive.”

“Not all of them.”

She worried at the label of her beer with a thumbnail, both tempted and remembering vividly the way Plutt had offered so-called gifts with hidden strings. _Unfair,_ she decided with a prickle of heat sweeping across her skin. Ben had never been anything but openhanded and honest with her, even if he did project a rather forbidding aspect to the world at large. 

_Ridiculous._ It wasn’t his fault he towered over most like a redwood. 

“I’ll send you my measurements on one condition,” she said finally. 

“Which is?”

“You are never allowed to tell me how much a dress costs. _Especially_ if you intend to rip them off of me, or something.” 

He stroked up the inside of her thigh, fingers slipping under her shorts. “I might, once or twice. From sheer enthusiasm.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you bought them in a shady deal from a guy in a back alley for pennies.”

Ben smiled, one hand as far up her shorts as the garment would allow. “You’ll never know.”

“Okay.” She took in a deep breath, unfastening her waistband to his obvious delight. “I’ll send you an email. Tomorrow.”

\- - -

His choice barely required measurements, but Rey was so enthralled by the feel of the fabric slipping over her skin she hardly took note of that fact. A lacy thong had been included but nothing else, and when she strolled barefoot into his living room, skirts fluttering after her and bodice flirting with the idea of showing her nipples, she really felt rather pleased with herself. “What do you think?”

Ben, in black jeans and a t-shirt, took her in with an appreciative gaze. “I see my wife.”

If only. Sashaying closer, she raised one brow ostentatiously. “You don’t match the scene.”

There was a flicker of something unknown over his face, but he wore a half-smile when he replied with, “You want a tuxedo?”

“At least a three-piece suit.” In a fit of truthfulness, she confided, “I want to see you in one of those vests, with your shirt sleeves rolled up like they are now.” She reached out, lightly touching his cheek. “I like the way you nearly bust out of clothing with buttons.”

With a laugh he pulled her down to his lap, eyes brightening when the shift revealed one breast entirely. “We could go somewhere,” he murmured against her neck, one fingertip lightly circling her nipple. 

“Where?” she asked, half-inclined to melt into him. 

“Anywhere.” He hadn’t shaved before their date, the beginnings of stubble pleasantly skimming up her skin. “You could be wearing this on a beach, or in a garden.”

The idea of playing a bride in public settled cold in her belly. There would be questions. Pictures. “I’m not into voyeurism,” she replied with a smile, and began unfastening his shirt button by button. 

3\. 

She broke her leg biking from one job to another in month seven (ice and a skidding driver who scared the shit out of her but never actually made contact, disappearing with a screech when she wiped out on the pavement), and wept furious tears from the accident site all the way to the ER. The pain itself was secondary to her to-the-penny knowledge of her bank account and insurance limits; neither coincided comfortably with the other. 

Calling Ben was a last-ditch measure, no matter that she wanted a hard hug and his smell in her nose. Rose was out of town, Finn had no car, Poe never answered his cell on principle. Ben would try to pay. Ben would take her to his own home and tuck her into his very large bed, under very soft sheets, and feed her before her stomach even started to grumble. 

Ben would never ask for any kind of repayment, but even so Rey remembered on a very physical level how much every meal and every basic amenity had cost her under Plutt’s roof. Lost hours of sleep, her few possessions disappearing, acerbic comments on her looks and her appetite and her uselessness. 

She called Ben nonetheless. 

Because she needed a ride. 

Because she needed a sober mind when hers was increasingly fuzzed with pain meds. 

Because she yearned for _him-_ and when he arrived, breathless and wild-eyed and so very big, she reached out with a drunken smile and a dizzy “There’s my husband.”

There was an odd sound from a nearby nurse, but all Rey could semi-focus on was Ben’s face and Ben’s hair and Ben’s hands clasping hers. “Sweetheart,” he said, and the part of her mind still working marveled at the hitch in his voice and the tears dripping down his cheeks. 

“They cut off my jeans,” she said grumpily, remembering the chill of the scissors against her skin, even overshadowed as it had been by the pain. “My best pair.”

“I’ll buy you a hundred more,” he promised, and she snorted gracelessly. 

“ _Fuck_ no.”

The details of her exit from the hospital were vague. Ben seemed to do a great deal of talking with serious people, and collecting of papers, and signing on lines (and Rey knew, on some level, that she should be paying close attention), but she left in a wheelchair half-asleep and arrived at his home half-asleep. Ben settled her on his bed and coaxed water past her lips, an arm wrapped around her waist, murmuring “Don’t worry about tomorrow. Everything will be fine.”

“No,” she muttered, turning away from the glass. “It won’t.”

“It will.” His breath was warm against her temple. “You’ve said yourself my couch is comfortable and that I have books you want to read. I’ll set you up in front of the tv with a pile of pillows and a bell.”

Her mood shifted sharply from drifting to despondent. “I’m going to get fired.” 

“Honey.” He crooned the endearment against her hair, one hand rubbing soothingly against her belly. “Darling, you don’t need to worry.”

“I do.” Her face was wet, and when she lifted shaking fingers she realized why: she was crying. Hard. “Can I be your wife, tonight?”

Ben actually pulled back, at that, looking down at her with a puzzled expression. “What?”

“Can I be your wife?” She gulped, throat tight and eyesight blurred. “Just tonight. I’ll go home tomorrow. I won’t be a burden.”

There was a gentling to his hold, an inexpressibly soft quality to his voice when he replied. “You’ve never been a burden, and you’re staying.”

“Tonight?” 

“Forever,” she thought he might have said, and he buttoned her into one of his own white shirts with a choked, “The prettiest bride I’ve ever seen.”

4\. 

“We should talk.”

Rey carefully stored away the plate she had just unloaded from his dishwasher, steeling herself for the worst. “About what?”

Ben, mouth set in a stubborn line (and wearing, she realized belatedly, a three-piece suit), shepherded her to one kitchen chair and placed a cushion on a second, helping her settle her injured leg. “About you scrubbing this place when you should be resting.”

She couldn’t exactly deny the fact, not when the entire house smelled like citrus. “I’m not lazy.”

That plush mouth she so enjoyed somehow thinned even further. “I wish you’d give it a shot, Rey.”

More than a little stunned, she crossed her arms defensively over her chest. “I’m _not,_ ” she spat back. “I’m not a- a shiftless, worthless-”

“ _I,_ ” he gritted out, kneeling by her side, “would dearly love to knock your former guardian senseless.” He softened his tone when she gaped, hands clasping her waist. “Rey, I don’t need you to clean. I employ people to do just that; you’ve already met them. I need you to rest, and heal. I _want_ you to take naps and snack and work your way through all of my streaming accounts.” Ben smiled rather shyly. “And before you protest that the dishes are a daily activity, I _do_ actually know how to load and unload a dishwasher. I’m even pretty good at laundry. It’s been years since I accidentally dyed my white shirts pink.”

Hesitantly, carefully, she reached out to toy with a lock of his hair, her gaze pinned on the silk between her fingers. “It’s- it’s hard to let myself depend on anyone,” she mumbled, releasing the strands to run one fingertip around the curve of his ear. “And this isn’t just for a few days; this is months in a cast and then more months of PT.”

One of her jobs had told her flatly not to come back, the second had promised to hold a place for when she was again mobile. Her rent was due in another week, and though she could pay that month, who knew about the next?

But Ben- sweetly, without being asked- had set her up in his ground-floor guest-room, and slept beside her every night despite the fact that his feet nearly dangled off the end of the bed. He made her dinner and made sure snacks were always within easy reach in the lower cabinets of his kitchen, he stroked her hair when they cuddled on the couch, he bought a stack of romance novels that never seemed to grow any smaller as she read through them. He coaxed her to invite her friends, letting them take over the entire living room with board games and pizzas for hours on end.

“I was planning to ask you to move in,” he replied with a slight shrug. “I had keys made for you the day before your accident. You can have them, even if you decide not to stay.”

She blinked, hand dropping to her lap. “Oh.”

“But I _want_ you to stay.” He gazed up at her with such earnest eyes she felt a hitch in her breath. “You could find a job you really like, with hours that won’t leave you perpetually short on sleep. You could pick up a half-dozen hobbies. You could spend an entire year mastering the art of juggling.”

Rey snorted a laugh, surprised and tickled. “Ben.”

“Stay with me.” He took one of her hands in his own, his touch warm and comforting. “If not permanently, at least until you get that cast off.”

She looked down at their clasped hands, at the protective way his fingers curved around hers. “You paid my medical bills, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He said the word so plainly that she knew he would just stare at her, stubborn and silent, if she tried to fight him on it. “You don’t need that kind of debt hanging over your head. If you tell me who holds your student loans, I’ll pay those, too.”

Rey narrowed her eyes, feeling more tempted by the blatant offer than she had expected. “Are you trying to sugar daddy me, Ben?”

His mouth twitched into a reluctant smile. “Not quite. Would you like me to?” A spark of mischief in his eyes, he said, “I’ll pay off a thousand dollars every time you take a nap.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Rey, that was an entirely serious offer. You can text me, if I’m not here. Honor system.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Ben.”

“I’ll pay _two_ thousand if you take those naps in a wedding dress.” 

Ben’s clear pleasure in the idea did not dim when she burst out laughing. “ _No,_ ” she replied, wiping away a stray tear, her shoulders still shaking. “I’m not mixing your favorite bedroom game up with this.”

His sigh was clearly one of mock disappointment. “I _suppose._ ”

She plucked at the pair of boxers she wore, wriggling the toes of her uninjured leg as she considered. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t want to… to earn anything from you, even with something as innocuous as napping. I know it isn’t the same, but after Plutt-”

Ben’s look of horror and intense apology had her shaking her head. “Don’t,” she said before he could speak. “What you offered was completely different from me having to work for every damn meal. It was silly, and sweet, and something I’ll probably tease you about later.” 

And looking at him, _knowing_ him, had her taking a leap of a different kind. “But I will accept those keys.” The naked hope in his eyes made her smile, her fingers weaving through his. “And once I find a steady job, you’re going to show me all the bills and I’m going to badger you into letting me pay my fair share.”

Ben practically glowed. “Okay,” he said as if the casual word were a vow, rising to a crouch to kiss her with trembling lips. “Okay.”

He kissed her again, and she tasted salt. “Ben?”

“Hmm?” 

“Go pick out a dress.”

He helped her into tea-length blush tulle and made love to her tenderly in their temporary bedroom, candle-light flickering and her hands clenched in the vest and shirt she refused to allow him to take off. 

5\. 

Everything she owned ended up in his home (”Our home,” he insisted the one time she referred to it as such), and her lease ended with little fanfare. The cast came off, leaving her with one very skinny leg that made her feel a little ill every time she saw it (a weakness, her mind insisted), and he drove her to and from physical therapy until she was discharged. 

It was easier than Rey had thought, to live with Ben. She had expected to never feel quite at home, to fret over bills and whether or not her things were cluttering his space, but nearly every day she muzzily woke to Ben kissing her forehead, his murmured “Sweetheart” a balm. She was his sweetheart, and no one else; she had her own side of the bed and a bedside table filled with a litter of hair ties and his love notes and a half-empty bottle of lube. Tentatively she began to think of their relationship as something that might continue rather than eventually end; with burgeoning hope she kissed him in welcome every evening after work, her fingers loosening his tie. 

She found a job at a small publishing company, and though they argued over her insistence on paying part of the bills she eventually won. “I don’t _need_ it,” he had said with a slight pout (and she knew, _knew_ that he said so not out of machismo, but out of a genuine desire to make her life comfortable). 

“No, but I need to do it,” she had replied stubbornly, and that had been that.

Wedding dresses continued to appear in one of the bedroom closets. Sometimes Ben asked her to wear one (always a little sheepishly, a winsome smile on his face), and sometimes Rey offered or simply showed up in white, one eyebrow raised in silent question. He bent her over couch arms, tossing the skirts over her head like an impromptu veil; he took her up against walls, fabric crushed between them; he undressed her button by button, mouth trailing along the back of her neck and down her spine. 

“Wife,” he would often murmur in what sounded like awe, and she got to the point where she couldn’t hear the word without blushing, a slow yearning building for a day when he might call her that in truth. 

One day in the spring, he brought home yet another garment bag, his expression indicating that he was forcefully stopping himself from vibrating with excitement. “Will you put it on after dinner?” 

“Are you going to dress up, if I do?” She pulled him down by his tie for a kiss, in the mood to play. “I could be persuaded.”

The dress was a romantic cloud of gauze, tightly corseted with off the shoulder sleeves, and they dressed together in their bedroom after dinner: him doing up her hooks, her rolling up his shirtsleeves when he would have put on the black coat of his best bespoke suit. He led her downstairs, helping with the billowing skirts, and out onto the back veranda- where she stopped on the threshold, taking in the multitude of candles, the bottle of champagne and glasses on the table, the brimming vases of flowers on nearly every surface. “ _Oh._ ” 

Taking a few steps more, heels clicking on stone, she reached out to lightly touch a star lily. “How lovely.”

“You like it?” he asked, coming to her side. “Rey?”

After carefully nudging a slightly too close candle away from the bouquet she looked up with a grin, answering, “It’s the most beautiful fire trap I’ve ever seen.” 

He flushed, covering his face briefly with one hand. “ _Shit._ ”

“No harm done- though imagine the questions we would have gotten from the fire department, if they came and found me in a smoky wedding dress on the front lawn.” Plopping down on one of the chairs with a satisfying flounce of skirts, she leaned her elbows on the table, chin resting on her hands. “Perhaps you’d like to pour your wife some champagne.”

An odd look crossed his face, one she couldn’t quite decipher. “I would.” 

And then, completely unexpectedly, he went to one knee beside her. “I would like to do all manner of things for and with my wife,” Ben said softly, eyes searching hers. “For and with you, for the rest of our lives.”

She couldn’t quite breathe- and then he pulled a ring from a pocket, and she made a noise that didn’t sound entirely human. “Is this,” Rey managed after a moment in a whisper, “part of our game?”

“No, sweetheart.” He took her unresisting left hand in his own, turning it upward to press a kiss to her palm. “This is real.” Another kiss, the brush of his lips a gentle tickle. “Marry me, Rey. Marry me in front of all our friends, dance with me at the reception, let me take you wherever you want to go for our honeymoon.” He toyed with her fingers, a hopeful smile on his face. “Please allow me the great honor of being your husband.”

She licked dry lips. Ben, wearing her ring. Ben, kissing her under soft sheets. Ben, gray-haired and still smiling at her in that soft, loving way. “Finland.”

That hope of his grew. “What?”

“I want to go to Finland.”

“ _Finland._ ” Spoken as if that were the most romantic location he had ever heard of, and then he was sliding emeralds onto her finger and tears were slipping down both his cheeks and hers. “I’m going to take my wife to Finland.”

They stayed out on the veranda until the candles began to gutter, tipsy on champagne and Rey warm despite the cool night air, Ben’s arms wrapped tightly around her. 

+1.

Rey bought her own wedding dress with her own money, Rose and Kaydel and a thrilled Leia accompanying her from shop to shop, sale rack to sale rack until persistence yielded results. “Do I get a peek?” Ben asked teasingly when she arrived home flushed with triumph, burying his face in her hair and tickling her sides when she laughingly denied him. 

They married in their backyard on a breezy summer day, and though Finn offered to accompany her down the aisle she walked by herself, hands full of pink roses and lavender. She said her vows in a clear, steady voice, Ben in a raspy one, and when he cried she tugged him down to kiss every tear away, leaving traces of her lipstick behind on his cheeks. 

“My wife,” he kept murmuring the rest of the day in awed tones. 

When he did so at their reception site- with icing still sweet on Rey’s tongue, and their friends dancing exuberantly- she gave him a sly smile and whispered in his ear, “Perhaps my husband would like to see the private little nook I found during my last visit.”

He pulled up her skirts in a shadowy, dusty alcove as far from the party as they could get, music pulsing in the air and his new ring warm against her thigh.

+2.

She was waiting for him when he got home, dressed in curve-skimming lace and gauze, the back of her dress as buttoned as she could manage by herself. “Hey handsome,” she said when his gaze warmed, his mouth curling into a slow smile. “Wanna tie the knot?”

**Author's Note:**

> I based most of these dresses on actual examples, which you can see here:  
> [Two](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/656540451920780688/)  
> [Four](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/656540451920839702/)  
> [Five](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/656540451920780694/)  
> [+One](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/656540451920809456/)  
> [+Two](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/656540451920785444/)


End file.
